Is now available.  This build is the first to be automatically sent to existing Trillian Astra users; please let us know in Bugzilla if there are any issues with the upgrade process! We’re releasing this build a day off our usual schedule in an effort to get the update code tested before the weekend.

Our datacenter work this week went according to plan (which is the most you can ever hope for, I guess?) and the servers are ready for their next big test. We will be continuing our work towards a larger milestone immediately and will update the blog with information as it becomes available. Thank you!

In response to the URI security vulnerability released this week, we have updated Trillian 3 to 3.1.7.0.  Auto-update should be firing for existing users, and you can use our download page to grab a full installer if you are so inclined. We recommend that all existing Trillian 3.x customers download this latest upgrade.

As a result, there will be no Astra build this week.  You can thank the three geniuses behind the vulnerability report for their professionalism (read: none) in reporting this vulnerability to the vendor before public disclosure. To the rest of #hack: we’re happy to responsibly fix vulnerabilities as they’re found, but would appreciate some advance notice.

Lastly, we’ll be making a trip to the datacenter early next week – all existing Astra testers are hereby advised of possible downtime.  We’ve posted more information for those who are interested on our forums.

Thanks everyone, and have a great weekend.

Build 49 is now available.As we continue to grow the testing team, the need for proper auto-update functionality has become more and more urgent. This week, we took the time to carefully re-implement and polish our existing update code. Because we’re focusing on testing both the client and the servers, it’s important that everyone is always running the latest and greatest version of the alpha, and we know how easy it is to be lazy about grabbing new builds. Build 49 will therefore be the last build you’ll have to download by hand; from this point forward, Trillian should automatically notify you when new builds are available and offer to install them as well. Once build 50 comes out, please be sure to test this new updating technology!

Lastly, we wanted to thank everyone who has expressed interest in testing our upcoming iPhone version of Trillian Astra. We will be adding more and more testers next week to continue stress testing the servers in anticipation of the larger “iPhone Release Event”, and will notify those of you who are particularly interested in the iPhone edition as soon as its ready!

Happy Friday the 13th. Watch out for black cats.

This week was pretty slow at Cerulean Island. July 4th came mid-week, and we decided to put out a quick build on Monday to address some important bugs that would have negatively impacted some of the new alpha testing team’s first impressions. This, unfortunately, didn’t leave us with an incredible amount of time to work on new features and bugs.

Instead, we decided to add roughly 3000 new testers to the team, our largest expansion yet! This aggressive headcount increase was due in part to the launch of our upgraded fleet of shiny Astra servers on the backend – as we’ve been repeating all along, we’re putting alot of effort and focus into ensuring that the servers can support the load of our entire userbase once we launch.  One of the unique challenges we face with Trillian Astra is that once we hit the switch, we need to support a large number of concurrent connections to our backend very quickly. As anyone who has done serious server development can tell you, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

Given our limited development time, we decided to take a small break from our standard development roadmap. (Yes, we actually have one of those! ) It was important for us to continuously watch the servers, add new testers, and make the small changes we noticed necessary as they cropped up throughout the week.

Ultimately, we ended up finding some time to work on some “alternative” interfaces to connect to the servers of Trillian Astra. We think some of you might have a unique need for this one…

(more…)

Hello to all of the new alpha testers!  A few quick notes:

• Build 48 is the latest build.  The notification on top of your login screen is a news feed and not an auto-update feature; it’s simply there as a stopgap until we build proper auto-update functionality back into Trillian Astra.
• The point of the alpha phase is to ensure we’re adding all of the right features to make Trillian Astra your IM client of choice! Please use this time to contribute your suggestions and feedback!  The product is NOT done yet and there are still plenty of features we plan on adding in the coming weeks.
• Once we reach beta, we will begin aggressively knocking out performance issues and improving speed overall.  Don’t worry if the build is running slowly for you, even on a newer PC – there are quite a few known performance bottlenecks right now that will be thoroughly researched once the features are finished. While we’ve done plenty of optimizations since 3.x, each time we add a new feature a new branch of code is in need of eyeballing and cleanup, and for efficiency reasons we’re waiting until the code is ‘feature complete’ before diving in too deeply.
• To those of you looking to get into the alpha test, please submit your application over at http://blog.ceruleanstudios.com/?p=9 – we WILL get to every invitation eventually, so please be patient!

 Enjoy the build – we’re looking forward to your feedback and suggestions so please don’t be shy! We’ll be unveiling some exciting new functionality in the coming weeks as we continue to grow the testing team.